


say that the wind will never change on us

by mapped



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, First Kiss, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 04, Reunions, Season/Series 04, despite the ominous summary Flint doesn't die I promise xoxo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-20 11:14:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17021628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: Three conversations about Flint's grave.





	say that the wind will never change on us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mcicioni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mcicioni/gifts).



> Happy holidays! I really hope you enjoy this.

**I.**

Their swords on the grass beside them wink in the sun. It is a day that eases hearts; the blue sky on such a day seems to forgive everything with its light that falls gentle through the thin white gauze of clouds. Silver’s throat is dry, but he is content for a moment to let himself feel that thirst, without drinking. It is almost a sweet thing to feel, when he has a full waterskin within the reach of his fingertips.

Yes, how sweet—to ache for something that you know you can have if you only reach for it and grasp it. He casts a sideways glance at Flint and thinks about letting himself reach for more than just the waterskin.

“On days like this one, I look at the sea and think how much I would love it for a grave,” Flint says, and Silver shivers. With Flint’s words, the breeze coming off the water immediately seems to touch Silver’s skin differently, with a new boldness that ripples the sweat on his arm. “I don’t mean that I _plan_ to make it my grave,” Flint clarifies, his voice low with solemnity. “I mean that for all that I long to walk away from the sea, for all that I do everything I do in the hope of one day being able to claim the luxury of a life on land—a house, a room with a bed and shelves of books, and… and _music_ …” He falters, his fingers trembling on his knee. “For all that, I believe there is nowhere I’d rather die than at sea.”

Inwardly, Silver curses Flint. Flint insists upon the melancholy, upon self-reflection. Self-reflection always tastes rotten in Silver’s own mouth. He only wants to let this day be as golden as it looks, for the memory of it to be clean-minted in his mind. In his coffer of memories, there are far too few shining coins. The rest is dull, useless dross.

“I didn’t save you from death at sea multiple times just to hear this,” he murmurs, letting his voice lilt with mournful humour.

“ _Multiple_ times?” Flint contests, grinning. “Surely it was just the once.”

Silver waves a dismissive hand. “I’ve saved your life so many times by now, it must all blur into one heroic instance.”

“It doesn’t blur, for me,” Flint says, softly. “I remember all of it.” His hand moves from his knee, landing on the grass between him and Silver. It would be no effort at all to brush Flint’s fingers with his own, Silver thinks, and does nothing. His lungs feel shallow, as if he is underwater, flailing and kicking and heaving a bleeding Flint with him, in his arms. He has touched Flint before. Wrapped Flint’s shoulder in bandages. And other times too. He must have touched Flint more times than that, but all of a sudden he has never touched Flint; never touched anyone.

His fingertips hurt with the notion, so he picks up his waterskin, the pliant leather warm from the sun, and he drains half of it. Droplets trickle from the corner of his mouth, down his chin. He sees Flint looking.

“You mustn’t repay me for all of it by dying at sea, then.”

“The idea of having a proper grave is laughable,” Flint says, drumming his fingers on the grass, and Silver wants to tell him to stop. It is always so distracting, every little motion of Flint’s hands. “Who would even bury me? Who would buy my gravestone? What would they put on it?”

“I _promise_ , Captain, that if you die on land and I outlive you, which is unlikely given that we do seem to be on a course to sail into every single dangerous situation together, I will bury you. And buy your gravestone. And on it, I shall ask for these words to be written: ‘Here lies James Flint, who was fonder of books than of men.’”

Flint barks out a laugh. “That is… not untrue. I suppose that may be the most inoffensive epitaph I could hope for. Thank you.” He closes his eyes and sinks back a little, falling on his elbows. “None of those I loved were laid to rest in graves. I would be the least deserving of one.”

Silver closes his eyes, too. He doesn’t agree, but he cannot say that aloud. He has never visited a marked grave. He tries to imagine what he would really put on Flint’s gravestone. It’s difficult; the thought is a long cut across the belly of his soul, through which his emotions spill like bloody guts. How to carve them as letters on cold, grey stone?

_James Flint. Captain and friend._

Those are the only possible words.

In another moment, he will take the hilt of his sword in one hand and his crutch in the other and get up. He will practise again with Flint until he convinces himself that they are both imbued with immortality. Because sometimes, out here on the cliffs, he can believe that he and Flint will be invincible as long as they’re together. They will fight beside each other, and neither of them will be the end of the other, and they will remake the world to be a place that allows them both to live forever.

* * *

**II.**

The water plashes against the hull, dream-like and tender, unbefitting the hell that Silver feels he’s in. In the silence, he listens to Flint’s breathing even out; they haven’t spoken a word in what must be well over an hour. He is almost lulled into thinking that Flint is asleep when Flint says, “So you’ll have me die on land after all. Though I don’t suppose they’ll mark my grave when I die in this place you’re sending me.”

They are lying in separate hammocks, swaying side by side. Silver asked for this, because he’s a wretch who clutched desperately at this last chance of closeness. He could not bear the thought of losing Flint without spending their final few days together in the most torturous proximity. But he doesn’t know whether this is a salve or a searing hot brand. It feels like both, at once. How can that be? Like a bone-deep burn, through skin and sinew; like a thick cool balm, numbing every feeling.

“No, I don’t suppose they will,” he mutters.

“Every promise of yours is dirt,” Flint says, without much vehemence, or any emotion at all. “A thief’s word. Meaningless.”

“We’re all thieves,” Silver says, endlessly tired, his control of his voice slipping away from him like an eel. He presses a hand over his eyes. “I’m just a better one than you.”

Flint grunts. “Someone should put that on your gravestone. ‘Here lies John Silver: a better thief than you.’”

“I don’t know who that someone will be. I don’t have anyone to promise me they’ll buy my gravestone when I’m dead.”

“Good,” Flint sneers. “You don’t deserve one.”

Oh, Silver agrees with that plenty. He turns in his hammock so that he faces away from Flint, even though it makes no difference. He can still feel Flint’s presence as he has always been able to. It is a heavy thing pressing into his back. For the rest of his life, he will have a second shadow, visible to no one but him, and now and then it will laugh in his ear.

“I’ve never thought I would have one, anyway,” Silver whispers.

“I would’ve given you one,” Flint says, and it shatters something brittle inside of Silver.

To Flint, Silver had been dead for a day, another name to add to his list of those without graves. What had Flint said? Those he loved… _Was_ that a list that Silver might have belonged to? Too late now to wonder, but even so, he may never stop wondering.

“Thomas may outlive you,” he says, and the sentence soothes his tongue. “When you behold that thought, isn’t it beautiful like a crystal? What does anything else matter?”

Flint is quiet. Silver thinks perhaps he is crying, which Silver can easily understand. When Silver thinks, _Madi may outlive me_ , he wants to cry, too, with relief that she is safe and alive, even though he has only lived mere days in the nightmare of her death.

Flint may outlive him, too. Silver doesn’t doubt that if Flint has a purpose—and he _will_ have one, now that Thomas will be restored to him—he may live a hundred years with the flame of it glowing strong and sure in his heart, warming the blood in his veins and turning it to ichor in divine alchemy.

And even though only hours ago, Silver was pointing a pistol at Flint, his finger quivering on the trigger, now the idea of Flint outliving him, becoming a god, a star permanently fixed in the night sky for future sailors to look to, while Silver withers and crumbles to mortal dust—that idea is all right with him. It’s all right, even as he weighs it against all the lives that have been extinguished because of Flint, even as he counts them in his head, saying to himself the names of those he knew as he adds each to the balance:

_Dooley, Joji, Colin, Adams…_

* * *

**III.**

This evening is graced with a playful sky, bursting with colour—sweeps of pale blue and lavender, pink and gold at the edges. It is livelier and far, far younger than Silver is. Silver feels the ache of every bone in his body, the way they creak and grind against each other, as he stops in front of the pair of graves.

_Here lies Thomas Barlow, who dreamt of the world as it should be._

Silver puts a hand on top of the other gravestone, leaning his weight on it and brushing his thumb against a small chip in the stone. 

“You got a grave after all.” Silver taps his end of his crutch against the gravestone twice—not quite a double stomp, but gentler. “Good evening, Captain. Goings-on…” He says the date, then: “Nothing. You were right. Nothing is going on; I am nothing and no one, and I miss you. I think of you constantly.”

_Here lies James McGraw, who loved and was loved._

The words stick like a thorn under his thumbnail.

“That epitaph seems inadequate. You were so much bigger than that. You were… a storm, a war. The sea made flesh. A hero plucked from a Greek epic. In another life, they would have sung poems about you. Though I’m not sure they could have sung any as fine as the speeches that fell from your own lips. Spells to bind any listener. You bound me with them once, I remember.”

He hums a little fragment of a tune to himself. A lullaby, or something else from childhood. He is exhausted. He wants to lie down next to this grave and drag the earth over himself and sleep. But to rest forever beside Flint, even anonymously, would be a privilege he has not earned.

There was so much about Flint that made him seem inhuman. Sometimes he was a cannonball, waiting for the right shot to fire him straight into the belly of a ship, ready to hurtle across the waves and crash into his target and wreak destruction. But sometimes…

Sometimes he was just the colour of his ever-shifting eyes—green in one light and blue in another. Sometimes he was just a soft mouth, a quirked smile, a dimple in his cheek. Sometimes he was just pale skin, easily reddened in the sun, splashed with freckles. Sometimes he was just a man in a beautiful coat, holding a book in his hands, his twitching hands, as though hands so weathered and calloused, hands so skilled at steering a ship through thunder and lightning, hands so steady on a sword and on a gun—as though such hands could be _shy_.

Sometimes he was just a man asking for love with every little flickering, hesitant motion of his hands.

And Silver had never given it to him. Even though there had been opportunity enough. It had seemed simpler, not to. To stay firmly in the known realm of the stable partnership they had worked so hard to establish. Venturing further into complicated waters would have put their whole enterprise at risk, he thought. But he sees now—he and Flint had never come anything close to simple. 

And Flint… Oh, of course Flint would want the measure of his life to be love.

“I suppose,” Silver says, “there was one man you were fonder of than books.”

“Two,” a voice says, and Silver turns, peering through the twilight, through the rustling trees. A shadow emerges. “There were two men.”

“Captain,” Silver says, unable to keep the tremor from his voice, which is weaker than it used to be, in any case. Flint looks… old. But less weary than Silver. He hasn’t had to hobble around on one leg for decades. His short hair is the colour of moonlight, but his eyes look just the same.

“Did you know I wasn’t in the ground?” Flint asks.

“I’d guessed. I didn’t come all the way here just to talk to a grave.”

“You didn’t?” Flint puts a hand over his heart. “That wounds me. And here I was, so impressed at the efforts you’d gone to, to pay your last respects to me.”

“Why the grave if you’re not yet dead?”

“I had to make sure it would be exactly as I want it to be.” Flint walks closer, until he is standing next to Silver, and _God_. Silver’s whole body shakes. He doesn’t want to hold himself up anymore. He wants to collapse at Flint’s grave, at Flint’s feet. Wants to kneel with his forehead against the hard stone and ask for oblivion. But he keeps standing, and Flint puts his hand on the stone, next to Silver’s hand. “I have no one to take care of it when the time comes.”

“I’m sorry he didn’t outlive you,” Silver says, looking resolutely down at the earth that doesn’t contain Flint’s body, and not at Flint’s hand. He doesn’t want to know how Flint’s fingers will dance nervously on the edge of the gravestone.

“Madi?” Flint asks.

“She’s still out there,” Silver replies. “Being an extraordinary light in the world. Just not my light.”

Flint makes a satisfied noise. “I considered using the epitaph you suggested for me, but Thomas and I had talked about it, and he wouldn’t let me. He said it would unjustly belie how much I cared for certain men in particular, even if not for mankind in general.”

Silver blinks. “ _Why_ would you even consider using that epitaph I suggested, in all seriousness? It’s terrible. It was in jest!”

Flint chuckles, and Silver feels fucking _miserable_. How can it make him this sad, to hear the real Flint laugh again, and not just the memory-ghost of him that always haunts Silver? “I know it was in jest,” Flint says, jovially, mouth quirked in just the way that Silver has dreamt about a thousand times, “but here I have Thomas to lie beside for eternity. I didn’t have anything to connect me to you in death, except that terrible epitaph.”

Silver starts to cry at the lightness in Flint’s tone, with which he said something so breathtakingly monumental. “Let me be buried beside you too,” he says, raggedly. “That’s all I ask. You don’t have to have anything to do with me now—I’ll leave you alone, we can lead our separate lives, but just—please let me. Let me have this.” The words coming out of his own mouth shock him, and he rubs his hand over his face hurriedly, wiping away the tears. The horror seizes his heart in its fist and squeezes tight. How dare he even ask for this much?

But then Flint puts his hand on Silver’s face, over Silver’s own hand. Flint’s ringless hand, so much softer than it used to be—how does Silver remember its previous roughness so well? How does he remember what glittering rings used to encircle those fingers? He does not know how, but he remembers all the same. He can’t breathe, but he stands upright, because he doesn’t have to hold himself up anymore. Here is Flint’s hand, holding him up too.

“Don’t leave,” Flint says, vicious in a way that feels sweet. In this darkening light his eyes are blue and sorrowful. “Stay and ask me again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and show me every day that you want to be beside me in this life and whatever comes after, and I might just say yes. You can’t lie beside me for eternity if you won’t even do it _now_.”

There are so many reasons to say no. There are so many wounds that will be reopened. But Silver is so good at pain, by now. Pain for this is better than pain for nothing. “Yes,” he gasps. “If you want me to stay, I will.”

When Flint kisses him, Silver doesn’t feel like anything but a man. There were times with Flint when Silver had felt like a higher kind of being—something supernatural, a monster or a god or both, every nerve singing with power, capable of bending the world to his whim. But he hasn’t felt like that in a long time. For years he has been nothing but bones and sore muscle wrapped in wrinkling, papery skin, yearning for meaning and finding none. Now there is Flint’s mouth pressing against his, soft as rain, and Silver doesn’t feel godlike, doesn’t feel that it steals his years from him and renders him young and strong and hale, doesn’t feel as though he could live forever inside this kiss.

What he does feel is his heart thudding with agony in his chest, remembering what it is to be afraid of death again; what it is to have something to lose; what it is to be mortal, mortal, _mortal_ , holding onto something earthly and ephemeral with both of his frail hands, with all his fading might—and oh, he would gladly savour this bitter, precious fear for the rest of his finite days.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the lyrics of the song ‘All I’ve Ever Known’ by Anaïs Mitchell (though slightly changed).
> 
> ETA: Realised I should probably give credit where it’s due—if this fic made you cry, it’s because I saw Hadestown the musical twice in a week just before I wrote this and it made me cry A LOT, and I couldn’t help but write a story about death in some way, and immortality vs mortality. The title is from a song from the musical. If you don’t know it, I highly recommend checking it out. Some of the phrasing in this fic was inspired in particular by the song [‘Epic III’](https://youtu.be/K77nr8-uhZ8), and the musical in general influenced the mood and themes of this story heavily.


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